The Wendish Research Exchange - Bartels, Hauke: On the Conception for an Historical Information System Documenting the Vocabulary of Lower Sorbian

Lětopis Abstract 2013 1: Bartels, Hauke: On the Conception for an Historical Information System Documenting the Vocabulary of Lower Sorbian – Plans for the Rectification of a Pressing Research

The object of this article is a planned, historical, documentary dictionary of Lower Sorbian conceived in the Internet as a comprehensive vocabulary information system. Against the background of an overall concept to document Lower Sorbian, several particular elements of the lexicographical conception of the project called SorbLex Lower Sorbian are presented. The dictionary will be the first one capable of describing the traditional vocabulary of Lower Sorbian almost completely, and will provide comprehensive information on the development (diachronic components) and the current state of the vocabulary (synchronic components). In the process, it is intended to make visible the formal and semantic internal links, and for this purpose to collect both information on word families, as well as on word fields. Because of the great variety of the information in the XML-data base, which forms the basis of the dictionary, different access routes to the data and presentations of the lexical system will be provided. In this process, the combination of the attributes of an historical dictionary with those of a synchronic description of the present day Lower Sorbian vocabulary is particularly important. In this way not only the possibility of a continual change of perspective emerges, e.g. between the description of individual lexemes and the word family, but also between the relevant synchronic or diachronic presentation of both levels of description.